The two letters are not unique. Their arguments are not new. Facebook, twitter, and blogs are filled to the brim with teachers complaining about the “broken” education system in this country while simultaneously decrying anyone who tries to reform it. Teachers, collectively, have taken an untenable position and the only way forward for them, as a profession, is to jettison the weak and under-performing of their group.

If they won’t do it themselves, we as a society are left with no choice but to do it for them.

In every career, profession, and job, employee quality varies from person to person. There are good lawyers and bad doctors. There are honest mechanics and shady preachers. The same is true of teaching. Not every teacher is amazing. Nor are they all talentless hacks. Yet, the national debate on education rarely deals with this nuance. Each teacher is painted with the same brush. This is no accident; it is the best possible state of affairs for the education lobby. It allows them to claim the moral high-ground at the first suggestion that there may be teachers who shouldn’t be teaching. You’ve heard it all: teaching is hard((It is amazing to me that it is not simply accepted as a given that there must be underperforming teachers if teaching is, in fact, difficult)), teachers are under-appreciated, they’re under-paid, they don’t get the respect they deserve, and so on.

Unfortunately for talented teachers, we are being forced to judge them by their weakest members because:

1. Our students are not receiving the education we believe they should.
2. Some of this can and must be attributed to a subset of teachers.
3. If we cannot address that subset specifically, we have to speak about all teachers, generally.

Governments, when they are behaving rationally, will decline to regulate a profession or industry that can fairly govern itself. As it stands, there is no evidence that teachers, as a whole, are capable of this. What other professions fight so tenaciously to avoid accountability for the result of their work? What other professions see it as an insult that they can be fired for something other than a felony?

Talented teachers are responsible for this state of affairs. Instead of trying to rid their profession of poor or unqualified teachers, they circle the wagons. Teachers write letters like the ones linked above. They berate reform and dismiss reformers. They fight change at every turn. But something has to give. Something has to change. If teachers — the good ones — cannot be trusted to police their own ranks, then external entities will have to do the policing. That means government regulation. It means reforms directed at the profession as a whole. It means objective measures and tests. It means attempts at one-size-fits-all policies that are bound to be too tight here and too baggy there.

The situation is even worse than it seems, though. There is no reason for a talented, professional teacher to want the tenure system to exist((This is not necessarily true for researchers who also teach, for a host of reasons beyond the scope of this post)). Those that need tenure are exactly the ones who should absolutely not have it. Lack of accountability for the results doesn’t help the good teachers, they are already performing well. And yet, when there is a charge for more accountability or more flexibility in hiring good teachers and firing bad ones, are teachers themselves leading the charge? Not usually.

So teachers, both good and bad, will continue to moan and complain about how hard their jobs are, as though “hard” wasn’t the default state for any job worth paying someone a full-time salary and benefits to do. Teachers, both good and bad, will continue to lament how little they get paid, as though keep the ranks of teachers as large as possible were going to somehow increase their value. Teachers, both good and bad, will continue to oppose any measurement of their own progress, as if we will eventually let teachers just decide for themselves how good they are at their jobs.

And while the good teachers are standing up for the bad ones, the rest of us will have to view the entire profession with an adult dose of skepticism.

The post Teachers Can’t Be Trusted to Regulate Themselves appeared first on Pete Holiday.

The left wants to fix everything right now. The right wants the federal government to have no part in it.

Neither of those are viable alternatives, and what congress ended up with in the ACA was a deal with the devil. The left sold its soul to the health insurance industry for some short-term gains to coverage levels. In exchange for some platitudes from the health insurance lobby, congress handed them millions of new, mostly healthy customers, a demographic known to health insurers as “free money.”

In typical American fashion, once we agreed there was a problem, we demanded an immediate fix, without regard for the long-term consequences. With a bit of patience, we could have something both better and easier.

To be certain, I’m no big fan of big government. I’m skeptical. I’m fairly certain that the primary role of big government is to generate inefficiencies that are then paid for by taking money from people who, largely, have no idea what it is being taken for.

Still, I’d prefer, if we’re going to do it, that we do it the right way. The federal government needs to either get its nose out of the health care market or it needs to go in all the way.

So what’s the better, easier solution? An iterative approach. We currently have a Medicare system that works reasonably well. It’s expensive, sure, and it is not without its own issues, but as health care goes, Medicare is a pretty good safety net. Medicare has an eligibility age. Currently, that age is 65. This means that medicare currently serves around 40 million people.

So let’s talk to CMS. Tell them that we want to add 4 million people to Medicare. We give CMS three directives: 1) tell us what age we need to drop Medicare eligibility to in order to make that happen, 2) Make any and all preparations that are required, including budget requests or other congressional acts, 3) Tell us when you’re ready. Then we send CMS to work, letting them take as long as they think they need. Once they’re done, we drop the age and wait. We react to whatever unforeseen problems that influx causes, and then we repeat that process, adding another 4 or 5 million.

This process can continue until we have 100% coverage in Medicare or, in other words, until we have a single-payer system.

This provides some huge benefits: first, we’d be growing within our capacity. We’re not trying to fix things all at once and running into problems scaling federal services. Second, it allows for periods of time in which uncooperative legislatures refuse to participate, but it does so without endangering the eventual goal — if you think there’s a political party with the clout to take federally funded healthcare away from an age group once they’ve given it out, you’ve lost your mind¹.

This plan isn’t without its issues. Specifically, that it could take a while — maybe a decade or more — to get where we need to be. Second, there are going to be growing pains. One such growing pain will almost certainly be a tipping-point — the point at which Medicare has sucked up such a huge percentage of Americans that private health insurers are no longer viable.

This latter concern is possibly farther off than it might seem at first. Consider that some of the most expensive patients are the oldest ones. We’d be taking some of the private industry’s customers, yes, but we’d be taking loss centers not profit centers. At first, this would be a boon for health insurers. There’s also the possibility that this gradual change would allow health insurance to shift from being a primary source of funding to offering supplemental funding for optional, experimental, or other care deemed inappropriate by Medicare.

Still, there may come a point that health insurers simply don’t have a pool big enough to swim in, and Medicare suddenly has to take on a larger-than-planned-for influx. This is something that should be a part of the CMS evaluation at every step: can health insurers survive after our next expansion? If not, we need to plan for our next step to be the final step.

Simply put, we need to treat healthcare like an engineering problem, not like a political, moral, or ethical problem.

Until then, I suppose we deserve what we get.

1. Contrast with the ACA, which is a giant political football, just begging for a Republican congress to repeal or neuter.

The post The ACA is Constitutional, but Still Terrible appeared first on Pete Holiday.

Except that, in reality, passwords are beset by several tough problems. First and foremost, you don’t have any control over what the website you plug your password into does with it, so using the same password for everything is foolish. That means that instead of having to remember one password, you have to remember a bunch of them and what services and websites they match up with. Don’t write them down, either, or someone with physical access to your space could steal them!

Those are all problems with passwords before individual sites get into the mix with their own restrictions. Some of these make sense; it’s almost pointless to have a two-character password, after all. Others of them are just silly: why should there be a limit on how long the password can be? Or what characters I can put into it? Then we have the myriad restrictions on how complex the password can be and how often you can repeat them.

The first group of problems are all going to be around for as long as we have passwords, but when it comes to the problem of users having too simple a password, there’s a painfully simple solution: base the expiration date of a password on how strong it is.

So under this magical new system, all passwords have an expiration date. What is that expiration date? Well, that depends.

If your password is something short and simple, like “dog”, it might be really short. Say 5 seconds. By the time you finish setting it, it’ll be time to change it again. If your password, instead, is 64-characters long and full of lots of special characters, it might be 500 years. Forbid password repetition and you suddenly have a password system that encourages good behavior: do you hate resetting your password? If so, you’d better make it a good one.

The immediate question becomes one of determining how long a password should last. The XKCD comic above provides one way of determining entropy, but it’d probably be exceedingly complicated to write an algorithm to generate that figured that out, based on its reliance on a certain level of entropy. Instead, it might make sense to use the table from Wikipedia’s Password Strength article.

You could analyze the password, determine which category it fell into, therefore determining an entropy-per-character rating for the password. From that point you multiply the entropy-per-character number by the password length, and take two to that power to determine the number of guesses required. This calculation would likely need to be slightly more complicated, because passwords like “password” would be worth almost a day’s-worth of guesses according to that system, but in reality the password “password” would likely be guessed almost immediately.

Still, the basic idea is there: the longer your password, the longer you should get to keep it. I shouldn’t have to reset my randomly-generated 32-character password full of special characters just because some idiot in accounting uses his dog’s name with a number after it as a password.

The post The Ultimate Password Solution appeared first on Pete Holiday.

Moreover, I couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to be notified the second they had a new message.

Not terribly long ago I met someone who, more than not needing to know every time she received an email, actively did not want that. I’m not sure there’s a logical or practical reason¹,  it’s just a personal preference. It took me months to really wrap my head around it, which probably says something about how attached I am to technology.

Then, a few weeks ago, I noticed two things. First, I noticed that unless I was actively ignoring my phone (like at dinner or out with friends), getting a new email meant that I immediately wanted to see what it was, regardless of what else was going on. Second, I noticed that this was almost always a disappointment. Rarely are my emails even vaguely interesting. Something on the order of two or three dozen times a day I would hear the new mail beep, I would get excited over the possibilities contained in a new and unknown message, and then I’d be disappointed by the outcome. It would also serve as a distraction.

I decided to tell my phone that when I wanted to know if I had new messages, I’d ask for them. At first, this seemed almost prehistoric. Now, however, I find that I really don’t miss it. The email is all there waiting when I decide to check it. I don’t have trains of thought interrupted or random distractions.

If you’re a push-email addict (except, maybe, for work email), you should try it for a week or two. I think you’ll find you hate it far less than you think you do.

1. Which is not to say that the desire is illogical or impractical, only that I don’t think those are the motivations

The post Giving Up Push Email appeared first on Pete Holiday.

Flickr image by konstantine1982

Today, instead of handing down the Affordable Care Act opinions like we all wanted, the Supreme Court ruled on the constitutionality of life without parole for minors, some immigration thing¹, and a third case² which tested some of the boundaries of their 2010 Citizens United ruling.

Even if you’re not familiar with Citizens, you’ve probably heard about it. Most likely, you’ve heard people offering various sarcasm and snark about “corporate personhood”. Those who opposed the ruling and what it represents did an exceptional job of driving the narrative about the case toward what turns out to be an absurdist interpretation of the court’s opinion.

You see, Citizens actually has a remarkably sane holding. So sane, in fact, that were one to read the actual text of it, one would be relatively unlikely to experience outrage, even in disagreement. So, if you’re one of those who mistakenly believes that the Supreme Court of the United States ordained corporations as people, read on.

The First Amendment prohibits congress from limiting speech:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

You might note that the amendment is utterly devoid of limiting factors. Nowhere in that amendment is freedom of speech (or religion, or press) predicated on autonomy or individuality. Nor is that protection from government meddling withheld from corporations or groups of any sort. That broad protection is important because it makes clear that speech (especially political speech) is an integral part of our democracy that should be limited and regulated only with the most careful of consideration.

But the problem, at least as it’s framed by various sorts of activists, is that Citizens extended that protection from people to corporations.

A better way to think of the ruling, however, is articulated well by Wikipedia’s article on the case:

The majority argued that the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation’s ability to spend money unconstitutionally limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.

Or, more succinctly, corporations are groups of people. A group of people, like individuals, has the right to speak its mind. The term “corporation” seems to carry with it a whole host of attitudes, stigmas, and other prejudices, but a corporation is just a group of people. It is sometimes a large group of people. It can be a group of people with a lot of money, but it’s just a group of people.

Kennedy’s opinion correctly notes that, had Citizens gone the other way, it would have opened the door for the government to curtail speech of the ACLU, Sierra Club, or NRA — all of whom are, in fact, corporations.

While it might be an impressive rhetorical device, the notion that Citizens created some sort of ”corporate personhood” is a myth. An often-repeated myth, but a myth nonetheless.

1. I kid; this was a pretty huge deal, but well beyond the scope of my knowledge
2. American Tradition Partnership, Inc. v. Bullock, which determined that state laws weren’t free to ignore the Citizens holding.

The post The Myth of Corporate Personhood appeared first on Pete Holiday.

On her blog, Valerie Tarico has an interesting discussion of the imagery by the two sides in the abortion debate.

Abortion opponents may be driven by Iron Age sexual scripts, but they are advancing their cause primarily by appealing to universal, secular and –ironically, progressive– ethical principles. If history has a moral arc, the curve has to do with one simple question: Who counts as a person? Who deserves autonomy and opportunity and freedom from unnecessary suffering? Who merits our compassion or respect? In other words, who is morally relevant?

For much of the article, Tarico seems to get what the abortion debate is really about, but just as she’s about to get there, she throws it all away¹:

The irony, of course, is that a fertilized egg is not a person in any traditional or meaningful sense.

Tarico makes the same error that so many others, on both sides, make when talking about abortion: she assumes that there’s one correct and objective definition of “person”, that she knows what it is, and that her politics are informed by it (and not vice versa). That is, of course, begging the question to a great degree.

The abortion debate isn’t about what a woman can or cannot do with her body. It’s not about whether or not a cluster of cells has a right to life. The one thing — the only thing — that the abortion debate is about is at what point we as a society wish to extend rights to a cluster of cells. That’s it. Once we pick that point, every other question very nearly answers itself.

It’s wholly irrelevant that those cells exist inside of another person. It’s similarly irrelevant that a certain confluence of circumstances could bring that cluster of cells to birth and then possibly citizenship. Those are red herrings. They’re emotive arguments. They’re not logically forceful but they have one advantage over the real issue: they’re far easier.

In the end, the actual question that we have to answer is not one that can be answered by reason or math. It’s a normative question.

So why are we still yammering on about all of these other issues? Because people believe what they believe with a tremendous amount of force, they believe it largely as a matter of religion, and people seem to get a tremendous amount of mileage out of feeling righteously indignant².

If we, as a society, came to an understanding that this is an exercise in line-drawing and social norms, we’d have to address each other more civilly. We’d have to grant that our opinion might not be any more obviously right than anyone else’s. We’d probably have to admit that our prior religious stance was a bit silly and over-the-top.

Still, if this is the serious moral issue that so many believe it to be, shouldn’t we be eager to have that messy, difficult discussion? I mean, at least those of us who don’t stand to gain so much from using this as a political wedge-issue.

1. To be fair, large portions of the article are really interesting and worth reading.
2. Also, it’s a good trick to get people who agree with you about other things out to vote.

The post What the Abortion Debate Isn’t appeared first on Pete Holiday.

Last night, Jerry Sandusky, a long-time Defensive Coordinator for Penn State’s football team, was convicted of 45 counts of abuse spanning ten victims and faces a sentence that could eclipse 400 years in prison. Karl Rominger and Joe Amendola, Sandusky’s attorneys, are now claiming that they were “unprepared”.

Jerry Sandusky’s attorney Karl Rominger, on his WHP 580 Saturday radio show, said he and attorney Joe Amendola tried to get out of Sandusky’s case the morning of jury selection, not feeling adequately prepared.

Judge John Cleland denied the request, Rominger said.

Cleland had repeatedly denied requests for continuances and the trial approached. Sandusky’s attorney said they only had a few months to try to get through all the evidence — thousands of pages of documents — prosecutors acquired over the three-year grand jury investigation.

I do not doubt, based on various reports from the trial, that Sandusky’s attorneys were not well-prepared. All indications are that the prosecutors ran an excellent ship while the defense appeared to flounder. The problem with this excuse — and that’s precisely what it is — is that we’re not talking about speeding tickets or simple assault charges. It was clear from the initial filing of the 51 assorted counts of abuse that the state was playing for keeps.

Why, then, if Amendola and Rominger knew they were falling behind, didn’t they call for backup? With Sandusky’s not-insubstantial wealth at their behest (and why on earth wouldn’t he use every penny of it to try to keep himself from rotting in jail?) they could have nearly hired an entire law firm of junior attorneys and paralegals to do trivial things like, say, read police reports.

“Sue Paterno’s name was only on that list because her name came up on one of the police reports, for no important reason whatsoever,” Rominger said. “We would have taken her off the list if we had actually had time to read the report where her name showed up.”

Given the court’s unwillingness to provide continuances, it seems that adding staff would have been a reasonable option, and given the number of out-of-work attorneys who would probably kill to have this case on their resume (to say nothing of having a job at all) it simply could not have been all that difficult to find willing participants.

I have no doubt that Rominger and Amendola were unprepared; what I can’t figure out is why on earth they’d advertise that fact in an interview as though it was anyone’s fault but their own.

The post Sandusky’s Lawyers Plead Incompetence appeared first on Pete Holiday.

Or I guess I should say that those are what it should lead to. Unfortunately, I have a serious problem with the second half of that equation. I’m no Joe Mihalic. Still, I make some efforts. I’d really like to not still be paying off my law degree when I start drawing retirement.

One such effort is simply making myself more aware of my spending patters. Enter, Mint. Mint is an awesome personal finance tracking app. You give it account details and it gives you tons of pretty graphs. That’s what’s great about it. It is also terrible.

You see, Mint routinely tells me things like “quit spending so much money drinking!” and “quit going out to eat!” It tells me those things by showing me how much I spent on those different activities last month and it’s kind of embarrassing.

It never seems like I’m spending hundreds of dollars eating out or going out. It’s $10 here and $20 there. No big deal. Except that it sure does add up and then at the end of the month I look at one of Mint’s pretty graphs and realize that I did it again. I need to start cooking again. I need to spend less money at bars. I need to do lots of things like that if I want to pay off my loans before the end of the century.

…and I’m going to start doing those things really soon. Next month. I swear.

The post The Cause of Low Self-Esteem: Mint appeared first on Pete Holiday.

So I purged. I threw away what must have been a dozen giant, black trash bags full of things that I had accumulated and carried around for the better part of a decade. I donated several boxes of stuff to Goodwill. I don’t miss any of it; I could probably stand to purge even more.

One of the problems I found with having so much stuff was that it created a certain amount of inertia. It makes moving harder, it changes your behavior, and it changes the way you think about who you are and where you live.

I realized, after doing all that purging, that I had the same problem with my blog. I had more than a decade’s worth of posts — three-quarters of a million words, much of it utter crap — that was attached to any new thing I wrote. The blog had a history, style, and identity that was a weird amalgamation of the all of the people I’ve been since I was 19. There was too much inertia to write anything new.

So I decided to start over. The old posts are probably not coming back — at least not any time soon. As far as the blog is concerned, I’ve purged; this is a fresh start.

The post Starting Over appeared first on Pete Holiday.